The 2015 Glammys & Goodsearch

The following post is presented as the result of a delightful contact I received via email from Kelly Allegretti of GoodSearch. Content detials provided by Valerie Greene of GoodSearch. Because of the local connection with Mt. Tabor High School - I thought it worthy of sharing.

The 2015 Glammys

“GlamourGals was my gateway to working with the elderly, which is something I now spend 15 hours a week doing, and something that has changed my life and view on old age for the better. Through my time with GlamourGals, I have learned that old age is not something to fear, the residents I have been able to work with have shown me that one can be just as vibrant at 78 years old than at 17 years old.”
— Jennifer Oberlander

The words above by Jennifer Oberlander, Daniel and Lucille Valerio Outstanding Volunteer Award winner, senior at Ardsley High School who will be attending Quinnipiac University in the fall to study nursing, are indicative of the kind of positive experience GlamourGals is about. What is it?

Bright, young women around the country are bridging the generational gap with makeup and manicures. Fashion savvy high school and college students work with the nonprofit GlamourGals to organize makeover events at local senior homes. 70% of seniors residing in senior homes are women. 66% are widowed and 46% have no living children. As people age, the amount of meaningful contact they experience decreases, particularly for those residing in eldercare facilities. . Beauty care provides a common ground to start conversations, alleviate elder loneliness, and spark lifelong friendships. The events allow elderly women to share their stories and have physical contact with another person, while the young women learn leadership and communication skills. It is a life changing experience for everyone and helps some students, like Jennifer Oberlander choose their career path. 


Every year, GlamourGals holds “The Glammys”. It is a pink carpet event to celebrate the outstanding, entrepreneurial young women making a difference in their communities. There are six individual award winners whom will each receive a $1,000 scholarship funded by the W.H.O (Women Helping Others) Foundation. Four winners will receive the “Glammy Award Scholarship” and two other winners will receive The Daniel and Lucille Valerio Outstanding Volunteer Award and The College Chapter Glammy Award, respectively. The ceremony will take place on Saturday May 30th from 11:00 am to 3:00 pm at the JW Marriott Essex House, located at 160 Central Park South, New York, NY 10019.

 
The Glammy Award Scholarship winners are Sarah Sandler from Sanford H. Calhoun High School, Ny, Evan Millican from Mount Tabor High School, NC, Janice Hur from Island Trees High School, NY, and Mathis Yaeger from Sanford H. Calhoun High School, NY. The Daniel and Lucille Valerio Outstanding Volunteer Award will go to Jennifer Oberlander, Ardsley High School, NY and The College Chapter Glammy Award designates a $500 scholarship to Carly Roman, Chapter President, University of Pennsylvania, PA and $500 to her chapter.

 
If you can’t attend the event? You can still help makeovers happen with through the shopping site called Goodshop. They have donated over $500 to Glamour Girls and will donate even more every time you shop at stores on their website. I haven't used the site, but it looks simple enough. Just signup and select GlamourGirls Foundation to raise them free donations. It looks like you can also snag some deals at stores, like e.l.f. cosmetics, BaubleBar, and Amazon.

Stumbling Block or Stepping Stone

A Coke and A Memory #MondayBlogs

Saturday I drank a glass bottle coke. As I tipped the bottle back, the glass against my lips, the sun on my face, the taste of the sugar laden soda slammed me into the past – what seems like a simpler time, a bygone era…


Riding in the back of my uncle’s pick-up, sitting astride crated glass bottles, I felt like the king of the world. – and in a small way, I was just that.
elcamino.jpg


During the summers of my preteen adolescence, in a time before plastic bottles or aluminum cans, soft drinks – or soda as ‘dem Yankees called it – was sold in 12 oz., glass, returnable bottles. Packaged in wooden crates and trucked to various vending machine locations up and down the Grand Strand – these bottles of effervescent liquid could be bought for 20 cents and kept tourists refreshed and coins in the pockets of motel owners. We were the latter. 


My family owned and operated two motels and a half-dozen vending machines. Empty bottles were in abundance throughout the strand and the empty crates racked next to the machines would fill rapidly with not only the bottles from coke brands that we sold, but other brands, as well. It was one of my jobs, as a lad of 11 or so, to sort through the crates of empties and separate the non-coke brand bottles from the rest. That meant things like RC Cola, Pepsi, Dr. Pepper, Fresca, Mt Dew and 7-Up (to mention a few) needed to be gathered together and crated. The goal, which made me an eager and willing worker, was to transport these to the local market, Chapin Company, and claim the reward of about 2 cents per bottle.

 
Sorting these bottles into crates and loading them into the back of my Uncle’s 1969 Chevy El-Camino was the work. The fun began when I climbed into the back, found my seat on top of the crates and rode happily, summer’s hot breeze blowing my face, through Ocean Boulevard traffic into town. My uncle always split the money from the returns with me and bought me a Coke and pack of Lance’s salted peanuts for the ride home, peanuts that were always poured into the neck of the bottle and consumed with the coke.


So much of that moment in my childhood is gone, lost to progress, safety precautions and the churning wheels of capitalism. Returnable glass bottles gave way to aluminum cans and then to plastic bottles. 12 oz. drinks that were once a treat for us, have been replaced by our daily consumption of bottomless Big-Gulps and 2 Liter bottles. Traffic laws now prevent the transport of people (much less children) in open pick-up beds and 15 cents won’t buy you water.

Still, the memory I cherish is more about the life I had – sun and fun, a supportive family, the experience of moving and being in the world, and working hard for a reward - than it is about prices or regulations. My nostalgia for the past doesn't cause me to long for a return to it, but begs the question…Where do my kids and grand-kids find these grounding, memory making moments in their lives? Ahhh…that’s refreshing.

NOTE: If you want to read more about the bottle industry history and learn why we occasionally found cigarette butts in the bottom of those recycled bottles (yes. gross), read a comprehensive history of the bottling industry here.

 

Best #WordPlay I've Seen in LONG While

24 Brilliant New Words That Must Be Added To A Dictionary.... courtesy of the folks at demilked. 

The Anonymous People - A Movie That Is Changing Our World

For too long now stigmas, misunderstandings and overall social environment have kept one fact secret. Over 23 million Americans are living in long-term recovery from addiction to alcohol and other drugs.. Why do we hide?

“...over 23 million Americans living in long-term recovery from addiction to alcohol and other drugs.”
— The Anonymous People

I ask you to take about 2 hours of your life and watch the movie, The Anonymous People. It's available on Netflix, Amazon Prime and iTunes. If you're in the Triad of North Carolina, you can join a group of us as we watch and chat together. Attendees will be supporters of recovery as well as people in recovery. 

Details in this photo.


Consider You Awesome

Stop with me, just a moment. We are awesome and amazing creatures living in an infinitely wonder filled world and we need to remember it. Observe that our lives are unbelievably amazing. Consider for now that the finite details of each muscle, skin cell, bone. Nerve and sinew working together to open and close our hand contains an amazing microcosm of miracles packed one upon another. The waves of environmental chemistry and pulsating, sporadic and rhythmical fluctuations of thermal connections of this typical, coming and going of sun, moon, tides and seasons world mark our time. Yet, if we stop and consider it all – even just the part that we call natural – how wondrous and amazing is our life?

Consider it for a moment…with me…deal?

Writing Epitaphs

“At the end of the fight
Is a tomb stone white
With the name of the late deceased
And an epitaph drear
A fool lies here
Who tried to hustle the east.”
— Rudyard Kipling

 

Do you ever give thought to the epitaph you want on your tomb stone? Or, do you ever wonder what your surviving relatives (always thought that was a strange connotation. Like they survived your dying?) would inscribe about you?

Apparently the possibilities are wide open. 

Here lies the body
of Jonathan Blake
Stepped on the gas
Instead of the brake.
Memory of an accident in a Uniontown, Pennsylvania cemetery 

Here lays Butch,
We planted him raw.
He was quick on the trigger,
But slow on the draw.
In a Silver City, Nevada, cemetery 

I was somebody.
Who, is no business
Of yours.
Someone determined to be anonymous in Stowe, Vermont

And my favorite,

"I told you I was sick!"
In a Georgia cemetery

On a more serious note, I think I know what mine may turn out to be, if I live that long. 

My wife and granddaughter (then 5 years old) talk about me a good bit. In a loving effort to help our granddaughter understand the people in her world, her grandmother will often explain other people’s behavior. I’m no exception. One evening, in anticipation of the coming morning – my granddaughter asked, “Will granddaddy Kim be here in the morning?” My wife explained, “No. He’ll leave early for work, before you are awake. He goes to work every day to make money so we can have food, a house and other nice things.”

That next morning early, I walked into the bedroom after my shower, to find them both snuggled into our bed, resting in the darkness. I dressed for work quietly, in the dark, and heard them talking.

Granddaughter: There’s granddaddy Kim… in the dark.
Grandmother: Yes. He knew we would be resting and didn't want to bother us. He’s thoughtful like that. He’ll go down and feed the dogs and let them out, too. So they can run up and join us for a snuggle. Isn’t it nice of him to do that for us?

So, as I’m thinking about how my life is impacting others, I’m hearing my wife tell my grandchild that I am a thoughtful, considerate provider. I've worked hard to be a lot of things: an excellent salesperson, a reliable employee, successful in business, an able public speaker.... But here I am, looking from the point of view of my family and I find that I am seen in a different light.

Provider. Considerate. Thoughtful. 

Honestly, that is an epitaph, be it written on the stone above my grave or on the folds of the hearts of those who remember me, that suits me just fine.

 

Speaking of Snow...US Postal Service Motto...or not?!

What is the United States Postal Service motto? You might be surprised...

Are you thinking something to do with rain, snow, sleet...?

Contrary to popular belief, the U.S. Postal Service has no "official motto."

The familiar sentence you are thinking of is this:

“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”

This is commonly misidentified as the creed of our mail carriers, but actually it is just the inscription found on the General Post Office in New York City at 8th Avenue and 33rd Street.

Here's how the official Web site of the U.S. Postal Service describes the origin of the inscription.

This inscription was supplied by William Mitchell Kendall of the firm of McKim, Mead & White, the architects who designed the New York General Post Office. Kendall said the sentence appears in the works of Herodotus and describes the expedition of the Greeks against the Persians under Cyrus, about 500 B.C. The Persians operated a system of mounted postal couriers, and the sentence describes the fidelity with which their work was done. Professor George H. Palmer of Harvard University supplied the translation, which he considered the most poetical of about seven translations from the Greek.



New Website format...blog

I'm playing around with SquareSpace design options... please pardon the temporary mess.

 

Oh...and considering a change in the name...

Rising

You know that morning sky, when the rising sun twists and swirls buoyant colors of orange and yellow with grey and blue? When the sight of it stops you and snatches your breath away, And in that moment you are reminded of beauty, real wonder that is this life and you stand there in that moment, that transient gift, knowing, aching and longing for more...as the colors turn to light and the day settles into normal? It is then that we are refreshed, reminded that this life, this breath, this loving is worth enduring years of normal for the gift of such a moment. Because such beauty cannot be erased from the lens of our minds or the canvas of our hearts. Beauty cannot be forgotten or abandoned. That's today.

Good morning.